It is well said that the British are ‘a nation of gardeners’, and as such they must all be aware of the manifestations of plant diseases. Moreover, in recent years there have been very welcome signs that the apartheid separating notionally something called ‘wildlife’ from anything classed as a garden plant (or animal) has been largely broken down. It is therefore singularly appropriate that we include in the New Naturalist series this excellent volume devoted to the natural history of plant disease. It clearly satisfies both conditions included in our aims for the series: namely, it will ‘interest the general reader in the wildlife of Britain by recapturing the inquiring spirit of the old naturalists’, and it maintains ‘a high standard of accuracy combined with clarity … in presenting the results of modern scientific research’.
We could not have found better authors to undertake the task for us. As they tell us in their Foreword, their friendship and shared enthusiasm for plant pathology go back forty years, and the book represents a successful new collaboration. Throughout its pages we appreciate this joint enthusiasm, and we share the authors’ hope that their many readers will gain, as they evidently did, ‘the same immense pleasure and intellectual stimulus from the study of diseases’.
It is the convention of the Editors to entrust each book to a particular member of the Editorial Board, to whom falls the task of drafting the Editors’ Preface to be published anonymously. For this occasion, I have asked that the rule be set aside, for the reason that will now be apparent. Within a day of my receiving the fully-corrected page proofs, David rang to tell me the news of Noel’s death. Both authors were personal friends of mine, from their Cambridge days. I do not feel it appropriate to say more, but can wholeheartedly commend to you this collaborative work which can speak for itself.
S. Max Walters
July 1999